Last Thursday, on his increasingly off-the-rails and decreasingly popular Fox News show, Glenn Beck insisted that everything -- everything -- he says about the communist origins of the Egyptian revolt is true, and that we'd be well served to heed his warnings because he's been right about such things before:

BECK: You know what's really funny? I remember back in '99, taking Osama bin Laden seriously because I didn't have a horse in the race. I couldn't care about politics. I could care less. I cared about my country. And when he threatened to kill Americans in our own land, I read his words, and I said, you know, this guy is not stupid. I think maybe we should read it and we should take him at his word. I warned that at the time that New York would have blood, bodies and buildings in the street. Yeah, the media brushed it off. Don't pay attention to it. Please don't let history repeat itself.

This has become a common feature of Beck's routine -- presenting himself as a modern-day Cassandra who sounded the alarm about Osama bin Laden in the years before 9-11 but was ignored. The truth, however, is very different from Beck's retelling.

Beck has, to my knowledge, never played the audio of his allegedly prophetic warnings, and the radio archive from that era is sparse, to say the least. There is, however, on Beck's website a recording from his August 1998 debut on WABC, and that seems to be what Beck is referring to when he boasts of “taking Osama bin Laden seriously.” I've written about that recording before, and for Beck to say that he treated Bin Laden “seriously” is not exactly true.

Listen to the audio, in which Beck reads a threat from Bin Laden against the United States, and responds by calling him “Mr. Baked Bean” and joking about the tightness of his turban:

Beck returned to terrorism as a topic several times throughout the 1998 show and offered his thoughts on “blood, bodies and buildings in the street.” Beck's concern, however, wasn't that the country wasn't taking Osama “Let's look at the latrine” bin Laden seriously, but that America would lose its nerve in the fight against terrorism. The context in which Beck made these remarks was the aftermath of Al Qaeda's 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and President Clinton's retaliatory cruise missile strikes on targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. After a caller said that Osama bin Laden will attack us regardless of what we do, Beck responded:

BECK: Well, I want you to know, I want to make sure that everybody is absolutely clear here that -- uh, how do we turn this system off here? -- I want to make sure everybody is clear. What he has done is the same thing that happened to us on December 7, 1941. We are absolutely -- this is a modern-day Pearl Harbor. And when we say we're going to war with terrorism, I don't know if Americans really know what that means. Because we've said “Oh, we're declaring war on drugs,” Yeah, right, and then we got a president sitting on MTV going “well, yeah, I didn't inhale, though.” This ain't the war on drugs. This is the war on terrorism, and I'm telling you, within the next 30 years, war isn't going to be anything like what we've seen in the past. We're in a whole new territory now. A whole different kind of war.

Are you ready? Are you absolutely ready to wage war against terrorism? You know, today they put cement pillars all around the Washington Monument. It's the only monument in Washington, DC, that didn't have pillars around it. You could get one of those damn fertilizer trucks, apparently, up to the Washington Monument. So they took that away from us today. Are you ready to walk down the street and see body parts? Because that's what we're in for.

Later in the program, Beck returned to the “different kind of war” talk, responding to a caller who said America won't be pushed around by terrorists:

BECK: Yeah, but let me ask you this, [CALLER]. As you see body parts of your neighbor or somebody that you were driving to work with, or as you come out of a store downtown and you see that a child has been blown up and the side of a building is gone, are you still going to support it? Have you learned the lesson from Vietnam that we can't go in and fight it half-assed? This is a war that we've declared, and we've got to fight it to the last body.

Again, there's really nothing remarkable about this other than Beck's macabre fixation on the violent death and dismemberment of Americans. Playing on his limited grasps of Vietnam and terrorism, he voiced his concern that Americans would let terrorist attacks -- which he seemed to view as inevitable -- discourage them in the fight against terrorism. When it came to bin Laden actually issuing threats against the U.S., Beck treated him the same way he treated quarrelsome callers; with dismissive mockery.

You also have to take into account Beck's descriptions of his own pre-9-11 apathy towards international affairs. On December 7, 2006, Beck told his CNN Headline News audience: “You know, when I went to Israel right after 9-11, I went there because I wanted to understand what was going on in the Middle East and the whole region. Honestly before 9-11 the whole thing could have gone into a whole giant sink hole and I could have cared less.”

On April 15, 2010, Beck told his Fox News audience: “In the last five years, I have -- I've gone from a big hawk to not Ron Paul, but on the road to Ron Paul. Part of it is motivated by we can't spend it anymore. The other part, honestly, is I wasn't paying attention before 9-11. I didn't know what the heck was going on in the world. Now, I'm paying attention.”

Nonetheless, Beck claims that he was ahead of the bin Laden curve and complains that the media brushed him off. But really, someone who refers to the leader of Al Qaeda as “Bin jelly bean, green bean, Mr. Clean” can't later profess indignation that his terrorism analysis wasn't taken seriously.